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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

This might be an off-tangent, but comments like yours are the main reason why I so much love HN, and why it has become more than 1/3rd of the time I spend on the Internet.

Thanks for investing the time to write this. You gave me so much.

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If you enjoyed this sort of first-order quantitative reasoning about energy use and production, can I recommend the book 'Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air' by the late Prof David Mackay? It's essentially 300 pages just like the grandparent post, about making an energy policy that adds up, given various bounds of allowable CO2 emissions etc.

Free online, and a the best seller physical book in the field: https://www.withouthotair.com/

Dammit. I didn't know he had died. He was twelve years younger than me.

The book is brilliant, we need more people like him.

Hugh Hunt started a climate lecture series in his honour: https://www.climate-series.eng.cam.ac.uk/

Also the Do The Math blog -- https://dothemath.ucsd.edu -- which does the math of many environmental ideas by a UC San Diego physicist who got his degree at Caltech.

Yes! I've read it a long time ago. Brilliant book.

His comments about the viability of PV are always to be understood to be about the insolation in the UK. Some people like to generalise from them to say PV can't work in Australia or North Africa.

His comments about scale are true, but also aren't entirely complete. You probably can't replace the entire economy we have with lower intensity sources of energy without also having to reduce energy consumption, is his key argument.

But, striking out the worst ones with the best ones we can invent is still interesting.

It's a good read, but it's not holy canon. Parts are contestable and parts are highly contextual and parts are conjecture. Actually.. that makes it quite like holy canon.

It's very specifically not a holy book because it does not hide any reasoning or ask you to take anything on faith. Quite the opposite - all of his working is shown, every assumption is stated, and you are very explicitly given the tools to calculate and update his work as new advances and considerations emerge. There is a whole chapter on not-the-UK, and how the math changes. The reason the book was such a global success is not because it was a statement of opinion about UK energy policy, but a proper treatment in how to thing about energy production and use, the tools for which can be applied anywhere.

...and then the other side of the deal, which is the widespread use of the text as a giant cudgel to belabour people with in an argument: in that situation it's exactly like hitting people with the Bible, wooden cover, locks and all.

Thank you! I'm very happy it pleased you so much :) I second the recommendation of Without Hot Air. It's very unfortunate MacKay won't be able to update it to reflect the developments of the last decade, and the next one.

I also recommend this book heartily - it's amazing. There have been mutterings about crowdsourcing an update, and I think I saw a github repo once but I can no longer find it. Here's an example:

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...

Here's the github repo for "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: https://github.com/titojankowski/sustainable_energy_without_...

Would love a new commit of some sort :)

For example he says: It’s possible that floating wind turbines may change the economics of deep offshore wind.

They are indeed now being deployed, as are significantly better generators per turbine. His methodology is sound. His specific numbers are going to have to be adjusted. His overall polemic will probably stand (that high energy density sources like nuclear make more sense but are political)

I'm not an expert in the area, so I could be wrong about this, but I think the steam turbine generators needed to get electricity from heat from coal, nuclear, or CSP sources now cost more per nameplate watt than PV—and, in many places, more per delivered watt. This is a result of PV prices falling by more than a factor of ten since MacKay published his book. If this is correct, then high-density energy sources like nuclear power no longer make sense economically, political factors aside. (Wind and hydro excepted, because they don't need steam turbines.)

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